The Genius of Norman Lamm

One Yom Kippur, a young rabbi in a prominent New York synagogue delivered a sermon titled “Divine Silence or Human Static?” His inspiration was a rabbinic statement that “every day, a divine voice issues forth from Sinai.” The question, this rabbi reflected, was obvious: If the voice of God continues to thunder forth, why is it not heard? His answer was that if we do not hear God in today’s day and age, it is not because God is not speaking, but because “we are too busy talking.” We are too involved in so many other things that are inconsequential and meaningless. Our society is too wordy, we are drowned in the verbosity of our mass media of communication. Words come to us not in sentences, but in veritable torrents, from mass media.”

One can easily imagine these words being spoken today as a description of the digital age. Yet they were said in 1965 by Norman Lamm, who passed away at the end of May. Lamm ultimately became the president of Yeshiva University, saved that institution from bankruptcy, and propounded in writings and rhetoric its affiliated philosophy of Modern, or Centrist, Orthodoxy. He is without question one of the most significant figures in American Judaism in the past half century. In the face of this legacy, it is easy to miss that, prior to assuming leadership of Yeshiva, Norman Lamm was the greatest composer of sermons in the Englishspeaking rabbinic world.

Every single sermon he delivered from 1952 to 1976 is now available online in the Lamm Sermon Archive. Reading the PDFs of these typewritten pages, complete with edits added by hand, one senses the labor of love that produced them, the attention painstakingly paid to both substance and style. This man practiced homiletics not merely as a duty but a delight. The sermons take one through the Torah’s text, but also the issues of the day: Israel’s early years, Kennedy’s assassination, the moon landing, Vietnam, the Six-Day and Yom Kippur Wars. In its breadth, few other collections of sermons in Jewish history can compare.